Marco Ajmone Marsan 2024 ACM SIGMETRICS Achievement Award
ACM SIGMETRICS is pleased to announce the selection of Prof. Marco Ajmone Marsan of the Politecnico di Torino and the IMDEA Networks Institute as the recipient of the 2024 ACM SIGMETRICS Achievement Award in recognition of his fundamental contributions to stochastic modeling and analysis techniques and for application of the techniques to obtain a wealth of pioneering results in the analysis of communication protocols and energy efficiency in computer systems and networks.
Throughout his professional career, Prof. Ajmone Marsan has published over 400 papers on performance modeling techniques and applications of those techniques to system and communication network design questions, resulting in over 17,000 citations, and a Google Scholar h-index of 55, placing him on Stanford’s list of the top 2% of Highly Cited Scientific Researchers, world-wide, in 2021.
Prof. Ajmone Marsan’s key impacts on performance modeling techniques began with his development of a class of Generalized Stochastic Petri Nets (GSPNs), together with Conte and Balbo, in a landmark 1984 paper that has been cited over 2,000 times. The GSPNs expanded the previous Stochastic Petri Net modeling technique to include specification of prioritized system events that occur in zero time, using an innovative embedded Markov chain analysis algorithm to compute the system performance measures from a GSPN system design specification. This technology paved the way for the creation of software tools that compute analytic performance measures directly from functional specifications of complex system designs for use by a broader scientific community. The GSPN also enabled Prof. Ajmone Marsan and his collaborators to model and analyze a significantly expanded set of multiprocessor system design issues, leading to numerous publications including Performance Models of Multiprocessor Systems published by MIT Press in 1987, and Modelling with Generalized Stochastic Petri Nets published by John Wiley in 1995. Collectively, his publications in this area garnered nearly 7,000 citations.
Prof. Ajmone Marsan also founded the Telecommunication Networks Group in the Electronics Department at Politecnico di Torino, which has produced a continuous flow of graduates who are at the forefront of research in nearly all European countries.
Contributions to the analysis and design of computer networks by Prof. Ajmone Marsan and his collaborators include a new architecture for multichannel local area network protocols with improved performance and reliability, impactful analyses of optical network technologies, and improved performance packet-switching architectures in collaboration with major companies in the networking sector. Results in each of these areas have been cited hundreds of times, have been used in more than a dozen patents, and established the Telecommunications Network Group at the Politecnico di Torino as a top institution for research.
Another set of significant results in this arena is his pioneering work with colleagues in analyzing and optimizing energy efficient wireless networks, beginning with a 2009 paper on “Optimal Energy Savings in Cellular Access Networks” which analyzes and optimizes the use of Base Station sleep modes to reduce energy consumption in radio access networks. This paper validates the analytic results against system measurements and played a pivotal role in the catalyzing of sustainability as an important metric in the performance analysis of networks and systems. One additional contribution that highlights the impressive breadth of his collaborative analyses of computer network design issues as well as his exceptionally long history of substantial contributions to performance modeling and analysis, is a paper he co-authored on the performance optimization of mobile wireless networks in smart factory environments, which appeared in INFOCOM 2018 and received the 2019 Best Conference Paper Award by IEEE Communication Society.
Prof. Marco Ajmone Marsan is a Fellow of the IEEE and a member of the Academia Europaea and the Turin Academy of Sciences. In 2006 he was named Commendatore of the Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana by the President of the Republic of Italy in 2006. He has received numerous best paper awards, and a 2002 Honoris Causa Doctoral Degree in Telecommunication Networks from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. He also served as the Vice-Rector for Research, Innovation and Technology Transfer at the Politecnico di Torino from 2002 – 2009.
Further information can be found at https://www.telematica.polito.it/member/marco-ajmone-marsan/
